Charles Spencer reviews Long Day's Journey Into Night at the Apollo
Theatre.

At the end of this superb production of Eugene O’Neill’s harrowing autobiographical play, I barely had the strength to get out of my seat. The dramatic impact is shattering. The raw pain, passion and even the occasional clumsiness of the writing are testament to a work of heroic honesty.

O’Neill himself described it as being “written in tears and blood”. His wife said he was “tortured by the experience”, emerging from his study at the end of each day of writing “gaunt and sometimes weeping”.

The play has been known to run for as long as four-and-a-half hours, a long journey indeed. In this superbly judged and wonderfully acted production, which finds flickers of humour in the darkness as well as aching passages of desperate love, the director Anthony Page brings it in at under three hours, thanks to the fluency of the playing and some judicious cutting.

As the title suggests, the play follows a single day in the life of the Tyrone family in their summer home in 1912, with the dramatist looking back on his own mother, father and older brother, all of them dead when he wrote it between 1939 and 1941, as well as his own younger self.

It is a family racked by addiction, despair and festering guilt, but in the opening act O’Neill offers a heart-wrenching glimpse of hope. After years addicted to morphine, first prescribed to her when she gave birth to Edmund – O’Neill’s portrait of himself as a young man – the mother, Mary, appears to have undergone a successful cure. Her actor husband James is palpably proud of her, and the two sons are less juiced up than usual. The production brilliantly captures the tension of characters walking on eggshells around each other, fearful that this brief moment of happiness will be short-lived.

Related Articles

As indeed it is. Confronted by the knowledge that her younger son has TB, Mary retreats again into a comforting cloud of opiates and childhood memories. The two boys get roaring drunk, and James, too, hits the bottle hard, lamenting his squandered talents as an actor.

As the anguished, tight-fisted father, David Suchet gives a performance of high-definition intensity, suddenly seeming physically diminished as expansive hope gives way to bitter despair. His eyes glow with love at one moment, spark with fury the next. And the passage in which he describes his dirt-poor childhood, which in part, at least, explains the meanness with money that possibly caused his wife’s addiction, and certainly explains his sell-out career, is overpoweringly moving.

The American actress Laurie Metcalf is equally remarkable as his wife, floating around the stage like a distracted ghost as she escapes her pain with hard drugs and tender memories that seem more real to her than the present. Meanwhile, Kyle Soller movingly captures the passion, fear and vulnerability of the young playwright, while Trevor White brings a terrifying, self-loathing viciousness to his brother, Jamie.

This is a masterly production of a masterpiece. It isn’t easy to sit through, but the dramatic rewards are enormous.